Three related experimental studies analyzed rate and accuracy of test response under time-limit and no-time-limit conditions. Test instructions and multiple-choice vocabulary items were administered by computer. Student volunteers received monetary rewards under both testing conditions. In the first study college students were blocked into high-…

Should a stimulus be defined as the single event immediately preceding a response (simple stimulus) or as a constellation of antecedents representing several preceding events (complex stimulus)? Sixty-eight families with a child between four and eight years of age were observed, and family interactions coded in the naturalistic setting of the…

This paper discusses two studies undertaken to investigate the effects of population concentrating on the behavior of human subjects. Particular attention was paid to the space and interpersonal contact dimensions, over time, within a prison setting. Mood state self-reports and the rate of psychosomatic illness complaints were used to determine if…

This paper presents data bearing on the question of the effects of crowding on indices of stress and on one's perception of being crowded. A palmar sweat measure of stress was employed to examine inmate stress in relation to social and spacial density factors. The data suggest that increasing the number of people in a housing unit (and hence the…

Based on the definition of closeness as the degree to which an individual perceives another as understanding him, this study examines some of the dimensions that appear to affect the perception of closeness in dyads. The modes of interpersonal communication which were examined are self-disclosure, touch, and metarelationship communication.…

Students were asked to make forecasts of fourteen quantities where true values would not become known for five or six months. The quantities were selected to be typical of the subjects which would be of interest to a decisionmaker in business or government, and included GNP, consumer prices, draft calls, deaths in South Vietnam, and election…

Seven paired-associates were constructed using words (for which scales values on arousal were derived by paired-comparison technique) as stimulus terms and digits (two through eight) as response terms. Forty subjects were randomly assigned to one of four conditions-cued or free recall and short or long-term tests following a single learning trial.…

This study investigated the moderating effects of previously conditioned, stable behavior characteristics on subsequent behavior resulting from a different set of reinforcement contingencies. The college students, who were the study subjects, were required to perform the task of solving anagrams under various modes of conditioning moderated by…

The author initially cites the associationistic position of Spiker and the perceptual learning position of E. Gibson and concludes that the existing data does not clearly support either hypothesis. He describes a new approach designed to test these explanations of the role of verbal pretraining on subsequent discrimination learning. It consists of…

The gain in word analysis for elementary school students tutored in a perceptual-conditioning approach was reported. Subjects were 98 first graders, 41 fourth graders, and 16 fifth graders. The approach instructionally separated the teaching of decoding from the teaching of comprehension; only single whole words were used and always out of…

This study investigated decision behavior exhibited by elementary school aged children in a laboratory decision task. An effort was made to separate 247 children into "auditory" and "visual" subjects on the basis of their performance on two immediate memory sub-tests from the revised (1968) ITPA. Since the correlation for the Visual test did not…

An investigation of response associations to 100 structural and lexical words was conducted in such a way as to observe commonalities of responses to the words, effects of sex differences on the commonalities, and effects of word learnability on the commonalities. Subjects were 80 white urban disadvantaged children, all 5 years old, divided into…

This study sought to discover whether high school juniors might have a relatively consistent preferred way of responding to short stories, even when the stories are dissimilar. "Way of responding" included engagement (the reader's report of his involvement with the text), interpretation (the reader's report of the relation of the text to the world…

To ascertain some diagnostic functions of conjugate reinforcement, narrative stimuli, music or stories, were continuously provided the subjects contingent upon their responding. Thus, data relevant to the processes of listening, discrimination, and preference were continuously provided throughout five studies. The majority of the subjects were…

The attitude assessment model presented here is intended to be an improvement over methods traditionally used to study attitudes. It takes into account findings by Astin (1969) and Berkowitz (1968), calling for a model expressing the covert behavior of a subject in terms equivalent to those used to anticipate overt behavior. This paper presents…